Contents introduction Chapter I. Hardy as a poet of ‘Time’

Key words: love, loss, time, nostalgia, Thomas Hardy, poetry

Introduction

In the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, Thomas Hardy wrote poems that, through his living years, dealt with topics of love and loss that were constantly intermingled with time. Thomas Hardy’s poems have caused a lot of controversies among critics that have considered his poetry too intense, too simplistic and even showing no evolution. Hardy collected a great amount of poetry and managed to cause an intense effect in his verses. His poetry includes both, the simple language and striking feelings: the poet manages to evoke, through simple language, devastated emotions that arouse extreme agony. In addition to this, Hardy makes use of ghosts, places and memories that are present within himself and, therefore, in his verses. In the selection of poems we are going to deal with, we encounter both feelings of solitude and passion that evoke anguish.

Hardy as a poet of ‘Time’

To begin with, we should look at the way Thomas Hardy writes poetry in comparison to the poets of his time. Theodore Weiss has argued that Thomas Hardy was being used as a “tool” to beat the modern-day poets, since he wanted to innovate and as a result, he is specially differentiated from others. However, scholars like Irving Howe (quoted in Langbaum, 1995: 27) argue that Hardy’s poems can be felt as more durable by asserting that his poems span two cultural eras while refusing to be locked into either, which makes it a source of his peculiar attractiveness. In regard to these studies, Donald Davie (1972) discusses that the post-World War II British poets rejected the productions emerging from the modernists to the traditional way of writing. Thus, Hardy’s resonances, in poems such as “Neutral Tones” (1898), address the ordinary reality, unlike the poetry written by other poets of the time. Because of that, Davie claims Hardy is the most outstanding influence in Britain. Even so, the ghosts present in Hardy’s poetry are hard to pin down since they seem to be an inheritance of the “Virgilian stage” properties and Hardy was, in fact, an Atheist
According to the critic, Hardy might be considered a forerunner of Larkin but he also believes he is a minor poet because of the “untransformed reality of his poetry”. (Langbaum, 1995: 29). Also, it is Johnson (1991) who claims that Hardy can make use of colourless places to portray emotions, as well as places not moving because of the memory created in the mind of the poetic voice (Johnson, 1991: 98). Simultaneously, in many of his poems Hardy travels the countryside, which is linked to the fact that time is always present in his poetry. Hardy attaches himself to a microcosm of specific places at quite specific times.
Hardy’s poetry can, at first sight, be easy to grasp. Hardy’s poems show that poetry can be easily understood and created through common sense for most English speaking readers. However, Hardy’s ghosts from his ballads are not only fantastic or folklore-like ghosts, but in his lyrics they are also “psychological ghosts of the Wordsworthian involuntary memory” (Langbaum, 1995: 30). Thus, the poet seems to be blending mystery, the immutability of the places and, particularly, time in his poetry. For this reason, his poems may be seen to come as uneven.
Hardy can be considered a major poet because he innovated: he modernised and
transmitted what was useable in 19th century poetry, even though by his simplicity many critics refer to him as, paradoxically, a “first class” minor poet. Evaluating him against the classic modernist poets, he is in success in other levels because there seems to be a great variety of tones in his poetry. Hardy’s influence on later poets denotes a powerful connection with the whole 19th century poetry but Hardy revised the poets from that century, while admiring them. Even considering previous poets greater than he, Hardy made revisions of romanticists like Wordsworth and Shelley. We can consider how Thomas Hardy was able to turn himself into, to a certain extent, a major poet because of his use of topics that other authors at his time did not. However, there is more than we can encounter at first sight in his poetry, as the indirect reference to time appears to be always there. So, I would like to point out that the devices that Hardy uses are in constant allusion
to the remembrance of memories and its implications. Because of that, the poet can be considered as
a poet of “time”. Hence, I would argue that there is no point in considering him a poet of “minor” or “major” scale, since his imagery is so powerful in relation to what memories hold that it is a “poet of time” what should be a proper labelling for Hardy.
The imagery of landscapes that Hardy employs in his poems play an important role in the allusion to time. Linda M. Austin (1998) discusses that in the Poems of 1912-13 the reader can see how the poet has used the landscape with what he claims is an ‘imminence’, but without symbolism it is not properly reached, so the concurrent capacity of nature cannot serve as an antidote to the lamenter’s conflictive yet internal suffering (Austin, 1998: 5). Linked to this, time serves as an imaginary fortress to the person feeling love or loss, or both simultaneously. In his theses, John H. Astington (1968) quotes J.G. Southword since the critic studied to a great extent the issue of time in Hardy’s poetry. Southworth states the following:
A preliminary glance at Hardy's images on Time supports the theory of the importance of his moods. It is not enough to say that he has a "saddened sense of Time” or of the "vastness of Time”. He subordinates his conception of Time to the emotional unity of the poem. […] Time is a productive force, an evil force that separates lovers, or "dooms man's love to die". It is a condition, a builder and destroyer, a sportsman that "but rears his brood to kill", a spirit that destroys the good as easily as it destroys the evil. (Southworth 1947, cited in Astington 1968: 3)
It can be affirmed that the importance of time in Hardy’s poems is the key issue to understand the sentiment that he is trying to portray through his poems and the imagery that he uses. It is the fact that he uses time as a link that is going to make his poetry be felt more uniquely. The presence and absence behaviour that the ghosts’ in some of Hardy’s poems is present seems to suggest the lament of the poet as he intends to move on from his nostalgic thoughts. In Hardy’s poems there is a movement from presence to absence and vice versa, where the lamented, inevitable disappearance of the ghost is also, paradoxically, a “movement” from doubt to affirmation (Volsik, 2004).
In connection to this, the poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries seem to be in connection with the notion of “poetry of experience”, a poetry constructed upon the deliberate disequilibrium between experience and idea, a contrast from which ideas can be abstracted. Thought and emotion were no longer seen as complementary, they gave different reports on reality (Langbaum, 1957). Hardy’s poems seem to be reliant not only on the emotions that the speaker feels, but on the moral evolution brought about by the memory of those emotions.
Additionally, I would like to link my arguments to the Bakhtinian idea of the “chronotope”,
which can be seen as “the road which is both a point of new departure, and a place for events to find their denouement. Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it…, and the fundamental pivot is the flow of time” (Bahktin, 1981: 244). As we will see in the next sections, this concept can be very useful to understand Hardy’s poems, as well as his way of uniting time with places and memories.
The selection of poems we are going to deal in this paper was decided upon the date they were written, their presence in anthologies of Hardy and the importance of the poetic devices that are encountered in them; the aim of the selection is to prove that Hardy’s verses, indeed, investigate how the psyche operates when memories are triggered by grief, and that the result of that investigation is the poem itself. In that sense, my aim in this paper is to investigate the poetic devices that Thomas Hardy uses in order to convey feelings both of love and loss through time, by linking them with a sense of space and place.
This perspective will allow me to go beyond the debates considering whether Thomas Hardy was a “major” or a “minor” poet; my intention with this paper is rather to uncover whether the poet, through the topics and the devices that he used, became able to express in complex yet accessible ways the feelings of loss and nostalgia, and the way in which they are attached to the
experience of time.